By Bob Hertzel
MORGANTOWN — West Virginia University’s football season, upgraded greatly over the past few years, has gotten even more interesting.
The Mountaineers have added UNLV to the 2010 schedule, have extended their two-year agreement with border rival Maryland for two more years and have switched the sites of its two-game series with national power Florida State.
UNLV was 5-7 last year, just 2-6 in the Mountain West Conference. The Running Rebels have not had a winning season in almost a decade, not since Hall of Fame inductee John Robinson coached them to a 9-5 record in 2000. The Rebels did own a victory over Arizona State of the Pac-10 and suffered a heartbreaking 29-28 loss to Air Force to keep them under .500 last year.
The game will mark the first meeting between the two teams.
The Mountaineers have played Mountain West teams six times in the past, losing two of them.
They are 3-1 with Colorado State, 1-0 with TCU, 0-1 with Utah. They last played a Mountain West school in the 1984 Bluebonnet Bowl, defeating TCU.
“This game came about just through talking with people,” said WVU deputy athletic director Mike Parsons. “It gives us a home game against a quality opponent. We weren’t looking for a BCS opponent because we already had non-conference BCS on our schedule.”
Maryland dropped off the WVU schedule after the 2007 season, when WVU beat the Terps, 31-14, as it wanted to play a West Coast game, but is due to come back in 2010 and 2011.
The series between the two teams has always been one of the more popular games on the WVU schedule, leading to sellouts at both places. It has also been tightly contested over the years, WVU owning a 23-21-1 advantage.
The teams have split the last eight games they played, WVU winning the last four and Maryland the four before that. The rivalry took on even more meaning with Scott McBrien, who left WVU after Rich Rodriguez took over as coach and went to Maryland, helped destroy the Mountaineers in consecutive games and then when Steve Slaton, who had committed to Maryland, only have Coach Ralph Friegen decide he needed a defensive back and withdraw his offer, ran wild against the Terps.
“We’ve been working on this with Maryland for quite a while,” Parsons said. “In truth, we’d like to go beyond the four years.”
The Mountaineers have Florida State on the schedule in 2012 and 2013, part of the deal with the ACC after that conference stole away Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech.
The Mountaineers will now travel to Tallahassee in 2012 and have the Seminoles return the game in Morgantown in 2013.
“This guarantees we’ll have seven home games in 2013,” Parsons said.
WVU has played Florida State twice without winning, losing 31-12 in the 1982 Gator Bowl and 30-18 in the 2004 Gator Bowl.
West Virginia’s basketball schedule is still a work in progress but they are moving closer to putting together and home-and-home series with Purdue of the Big Ten.
“Nothing is firm on that,” Parsons said. “Nothing’s firm until we have a signed contract.”
E-mail Bob Hertzel at bhertzel@hotmail.com.
